1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for comparing electronic documents to find a relevant document from among similar documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the advantages of electronic documents is that a new electronic document can be created by using a part of an existing electronic document. With an effective use of the existing document in creating a new document, not only efficiency in creating a document but also a quality of the new document can be increased if the existing document is of a good quality.
Therefore, it is important to select an appropriate document for a base of the new document. Today, a large number of electronic documents are created, and there are abundant source documents to be recycled in a new document. However, this makes it rather difficult to select an appropriate document.
A desired document is often searched by specifying a keyword, and by searching based on the keyword from innumerable electronic documents. Other technologies that aid for searching a document are disclosed. In the technologies, a document is searched based on multimedia content in the document (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2000-148793) or based on a document layout (for example, Japanese Patent Application No. 2005-140135).
However, even with the above conventional technologies, it is still necessary to open all of documents obtained as a result of the search and to check the contents of the documents, to find an optimal document to be used for a base of a new document. Such a work requires a lot of time and labor. Moreover, it is difficult to find difference in the contents of the documents when the documents have created based on an identical document.